Trump and his friends really do avoid paying a lot of taxes

As bad as you might think inequality is, the reality is itâ€™s even worse for a very simple reason: Taxes really are only for the little people.

By which I mean anyone who doesnâ€™t have a net worth solidly in the nine figures.

None of this is exactly news, but, as The New York Timesâ€™s blockbuster report on how President Donald Trump managed to inherit $413 million in inflation-adjusted dollars without paying much in the way of gift or estate taxes shows us, itâ€™s important to remember that the super-rich tend to be even more super and rich than the tax returns that economists use to estimate inequality say they are. That isnâ€™t to say that the uber-wealthy are all bending the law to the point of potentially breaking it, like the Trumps are alleged to have done - disguising gifts as â€śloans,â€ť inflating invoices to make other gifts look like business income, and assessing properties at wildly different values, sometimes within weeks of each other, to minimize their tax bill - but rather that there are plenty of other more and less legitimate ways for well-heeled individuals and companies to shield their money from Uncle Sam.

Like using tax havens.

Now, on the legal end of the spectrum, thereâ€™s the way that companies shift their profits to show up in low-tax jurisdictions such as Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. This, according to Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and his co-researchers, covers as much as 40 percent of all multinational profits and 50 percent of U.S. ones. To put that in perspective, U.S. companies report more profits in Ireland, the top tax-avoidance destination in the world, than they do in China, Japan, Germany, France and Mexico combined. All of this can be inferred from the fact that foreign firms tend - on paper - to be much more profitable than local ones within these tax havens. Not to mention that multinationals book five times as many profits in their haven subsidiaries as they do in their non-haven ones. This, as you might expect, increases inequality, but it doesnâ€™t do it in a way that escapes the eyes of the authorities. Whenever these â€śoverseasâ€ť profits are paid out to investors - a bit of a misnomer, because a lot of that money is often invested in things such as U.S. Treasury and corporate bonds despite being listed in other countries for accounting purposes - they still have to pay taxes on it here, so we can keep track of how much they have.

That isnâ€™t the case, though, when it comes to the less scrupulous use of these havens: the outright evading of taxes. The problem, of course, is that, by its very nature, this isnâ€™t the kind of thing we can even begin to quantify. People, after all, donâ€™t exactly fill out formstelling us how much of their taxes theyâ€™re not paying. But it turns out that we donâ€™t need them to. Thatâ€™s because the Bank for International Settlements has begun publishing statistics on the banking relationships between different countries that allow us to stitch together a picture of how much wealth is being held offshore. And itâ€™s a lot. Indeed, Zucman and his team estimate that around 10 percent of global GDP is being held inside all the different tax havens. Itâ€™s actually not as bad for the United States as it is for a lot of other countries - about half of Russiaâ€™s wealth, for example, has been moved out of the country - but itâ€™s enough to increase the top 0.01 percentâ€™s share of household wealth from around 7 to almost 8 percent. Thatâ€™s over $1 trillion hiding overseas.

But rather than do anything about this, the Trump administration and the Republican Party as a whole have continued to starve the IRS of the money it would need to pursue these kind of investigations. In the past eight years, tax fraud cases are down 25 percent.

In the meantime, then, the rich will be able to get richer the old-fashioned way: by finding ways not to pay taxes.

Matt Oâ€™Brien is a reporter for Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at the Atlantic.